Алексей Ощепков – Triologues of Interdependent People (страница 7)
“Checkpoints,” Dr. Cernus emphasized.
“Border crossings? That’s only part of a boundary—a topological error. A thief belongs in prison, not passing customs.”
“When confined to non-standard prison cells, criminals either drop out of active agency or maintain their profile—e.g., as phone scammers. If a criminal holds managerial status, incarceration doesn’t always halt economic activity. Forced labour, meanwhile, is counted as civil-service labour. But the Belomorkanal era is over; few states derive serious economic output from such labour. Look—we’ve already described how actors at different levels differ in core properties. Now note: when identifying structural features, we must attend to process timescales. Within one stratum, durations are roughly of the same order; across countries, they differ by orders of magnitude. Criminal networks decide instantly. ‘Boring’ firms take months. But time and space are linked. Therefore…”
“Each stratum has its own characteristic spatial reference points,” Rr. Unkno interjected. “Actors within a stratum perturb boundaries with disturbances of comparable magnitude. You’re referring not to transaction sums, but to *how* boundaries are crossed—I take it?”
“Not money. More like ‘action’ or ‘mean free path,’ borrowing from statistical physics. Indeed, directly observed reductions in pressure on criminal networks immediately increase their occupied volume. Kinetically, this is simple: the ‘mean free path’ of constituent actors grows. Heating the solid, bonded stratum merely makes embedded actors vibrate more intensely in place, with negligible system-wide expansion—yet it possesses high heat capacity, storing energy usable for good or ill. Heating the liquid stratum, however, might inadvertently cause boiling—triggering mass flight into the gaseous state.”
“I see merit in your constructs, but your illustrations amount to a kind of reductionism.”
“Yet history shows such approaches often yield fruitful results,” Dr. Cernus agreed with the characterization.
“Then you must have the next obvious step ready: moving from your corpuscular model to a continuum one. That is, you must formulate an ‘interaction field’ and reveal its role in economic interaction.”
Without removing his left hand from the handlebars, Dr. Cernus raised his right toward the sky, culminating the gesture with an upward-pointing finger.
“I’m not seeking an analogue of ‘field,’” he said. “I assure you, phase space will suffice. Of the two known approaches to discovering regularities—dynamic and statistical—I need neither. I won’t seek regularities at all.”
“Because no one’s succeeded so far?” Unkno wasn’t surprised by the doctor’s stance.
“Partly that. Dynamic-type laws yield strictly deterministic predictions. Despite widespread use, this approach fails utterly in economics. Let’s drop political correctness: it’s become a common—even mandatory in many academic circles—form of charlatanism. In economics, only methods embracing imprecise, probabilistic outcomes make sense. For example, most images online are lossily compressed—that’s a statistical approach. AI sometimes ‘hallucinates.’”
“Often.”
“Often. Also a result of statistical methods. Again: dynamic regularities are defined by strict, unambiguous relationships in all cases. Negatively stated: where strict unambiguity is absent, no such regularities exist. From unambiguous links follows their equivalence—any considered relationship, regardless of the nature of the properties involved, is deemed equally necessary. This doesn’t work in economics—and cannot.”
“I get it, I get it,” Unkno urged. “You started saying something about phase space.”
“The point is,” Dr. Cernus said, “that unlike economic actors—individuals, firms, or non-profits—a transaction is a relatively simple entity. We can define certain states to describe it. Its active lifetime is secondary and variable. But if we take decision-makers as the unit of analysis—as is customary—we cannot construct a phase-space analogue.”
“One must treat the concept of ‘system state’ with caution,” Rr. Unkno intoned didactically. A faint scent of sweat clung to him. “Typically, it denotes a specific configuration that uniquely determines the system’s future evolution. Defining a state usually requires specifying a set of descriptive parameters, fixing initial conditions at a chosen time, and applying laws of motion. But as we’ve said, we shouldn’t expect to derive such laws. Thus, we must remember: we won’t know system states in the conventional sense. We can only know something akin to
Dr. Cernus was slightly irked by Unkno’s patronizing tone—unwarranted by depth—but gave no sign:
“One could smile and recall the old quip about ‘average hospital temperature,’ but temperature truly is a vital system characteristic. For physical bodies, temperature changes can trigger transformations far more profound than mere spatial relocation—gas condensing to liquid, liquid freezing to solid, and so on.”
Unkno nodded silently—and they exchanged not a word until the checkpoint.
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3. Structural Crisis and the Laziness of Being
Chapter Three, in which Rr. Unkno and Dr. Cernus, en route to Kowshinovoh, outline the current crisis, its historical roots, and underlying logic.
~
During the intervening time, the doctor had reflected on what in his manner of speech might have provoked—even slightly—that unpleasant prosecutorial note in ritter Unkno’s tone. Dismissing outright the notion that it was mere intolerance of differing worldviews, yet reaching no firm conclusion, Cernus simply resolved to be even more pliable.
“Annoying, but I didn’t find time yesterday to sum up the day’s conversation,” Cernus said. “Now I’m ready.”
“By all means,” Unkno replied.
They were passing a crooked fence that once enclosed a great medieval polis. The doctor summarized:
“Instead of static equilibrium models, the Emperor should consider tracking accelerations—nonlinear shifts in value, saturation, and behavior—within a self-sufficient territory, of course. Textbooks describing ‘rational individuals’ are naive fictions that ignore real-world power, corruption, and systemic irrationality. The economy is structurally fragmented. Human systems obey the principle of ‘laziness,’ not scarcity. Order is defined by boundaries, not rules. Statistical—not deterministic—methods are valid. The proper unit of analysis is transactions, not agents. We can only measure ‘temperature,’ not truth.”
“Doesn’t it trouble you, Cernus,” Rr. Unkno said, offering no comment on the doctor’s compendium, “that our cities still fall short of the cantons of the Land of Mountain Fire?”
“That confederation is the only Western country where cities remain better kept. And for some reason, I can’t shake the feeling that the architects of both world wars live there—and likely those who now crave a third. Their acting Emperor is little more than a clown.”
“The nominal head of the last superpower must ‘be funny for everyone,’” Unkno countered. “Otherwise, no one would have cause to laugh… Do you not see this as cunning, Cernus?”
“That they’re pretending to be weakened? No. I don’t see it that way at all. Such a maneuver would be executed quite differently.”
“How so?”
“Solid materials can become brittle under deformation and fragile at low temperatures—that is, under energy deficit. We usually assume that initial defects in, say, multi-metal alloys only hasten their failure: microcracks grow into macrocracks, impurities cloud crystals, and so on. Yet if you deliberately engineer ‘twist defects’ into an alloy of niobium, tantalum, titanium, and hafnium from the outset, it becomes
“Fascinating,” Rr. Unkno conceded. “What about their media policy? Could the absurdity built into it serve as just such a reserve of strength?”
“That, too, ought to have been done differently. Though I couldn’t say how, exactly. What’s happening now resembles more the
“And what was in them, besides the most venomous satire imaginable?”
“It was a clever blow by humanists against their chief enemies—the obscurantists of scholastic universities. Rather than argue directly, the humanists let their opponents ‘expose themselves’ in their own words. The book became a sensation, read like a gripping pamphlet, and dealt scholasticism a devastating blow in public opinion. The
“And who’s being entertained now? Residents of the Land of Mountain Fire?”
“Possibly,” Cernus said. “We were, by the way, already discussing last night how… the West is on its last legs… No, I believe, we mentioned that the Western social contract had already become a ghost of its former self. The unspoken pact guaranteeing the fundamental attainability of the ‘Western dream’ through hard work has been forgotten. Their economy is on its last breath—still twitching, but the population has sunk deep and hopelessly into disillusionment about the future. Therefore, while dissecting this corpse, I believe it’s appropriate to sketch the defining features of past eras.”